Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Here’s the comedy/news bit from yesterday’s “Real Time”: another New Rules bit called “The MUSKeteers,” so you know what the subject is. Maher takes up Musk’s suggestion that we create a new political party comprising the 80% of Americans “in the middle.” Maher admires Musk’s engineering ability, but not his ability to manage the government; nor does Maher like Musk’s handling of Twitter, which apparently isn’t the free-speech zone Musk had promised. Still Maher runs through a list of Musk’s engineering accomplishments (Starlink, electric cars, SpaceX, etc.), and that alone will rile up those Manichaean progressives who cannot allow themselves to admit that Musk ever did anything good.
In the end, Maher asserts that Musk simply doesn’t belong in government, as it’s a completely different skillset (if you can call it “skill”; Maher calls it “the opposite of exceptional”).
Note that Maher uses one of my famous phrases: “It’s Chinatown, Jake.”
There’s also a four minute discussion between Maher and Senator John Fetterman. There’s not a lot of substance to it, but I do like Fetterman, and not just because he’s sympathetic to Israel. He’s a down-home guy and doesn’t put up with bullshit, a quality we need more of in Congress.
The ancestry-testing company 23andMe has had a hard go lately. First, in 2023 a data leak at the company exposed millions of customers’ personal information—inhcluding genetic information—to hackers. As Wikipedia reports:
The cyberattack gathered profile and ethnicity information from millions of users. The affected customers were reported as primarily Ashkenazi Jews but also including hundreds of thousands of ethnically Chinese users. The hacker(s) stole information customers had chosen to share with their DNA matches, which could include name, profile photo, birth year, location, family surnames, grandparents’ birthplaces, ethnicity estimates, mitochondrial DNA haplogroup, Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup, link to external family tree, and any text content a customer had optionally included in their “About” section. On October 6, 2023, the company confirmed that the hacker(s) had illicitly accessed data on approximately 6.9 million users.
And now the company is going to sell off its genetic data to a new company, TTAM Research Institute. We were informed by 23andMe (I was a customer), that we could have our genetic data deleted before the sale, and I naturally did this; I believe I urged customers somewhere on this site to delete their data, too (you can always use a different company in the future). But 23andMe is now subject to a lawsuit involving this sale:
Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia have sued the genetic-testing company 23andMe to oppose the sale of DNA data from its customers without their direct consent.
The suit, filed on Monday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Eastern District of Missouri, argues that 23andMe needs to have permission from each and every customer before their data is potentially sold. The company had entered an agreement to sell itself and its assets in bankruptcy court.
The information for sale “comprises an unprecedented compilation of highly sensitive and immutable personal data of consumers,” according to the lawsuit.
The CEO of the company was promptly dragged before a Senate committee to explain what 23andMe were going to do with the data, and his performance, as you’ll see in the eight-minute video below, was abysmal; he wriggled like a caught eel.
This wiggling and evasion from CEO Joseph Selsavage is even more waffle-y than was the testimony of the MIT, Harvard, and Penn Presidents before Congress (actually, the Presidents answered accurately, but it wasn’t good enough for Representative Elise Stefanik). A reader sent me the link to the new
video with this comment:
I thought you might be interested in this. You recommended that readers who used 23&Me to conduct genetic analysis might want to delete their data after the company claimed bankruptcy and intend to sell this data to Regeneron for $300M [JAC: see above, TTAM won the bidding over Regeneron.] I followed your sound advice.
Very disconcerting is this hearing where Senator Josh Hawley absolutely hammers the CEO of 23&Me about whether they are actually deleting our data or not even after instructed by customers to do so. It’s not clear if they are actually permanently expunging our data records or not given the waffling but how outrageous if they are not:
Here’s the caption for the YouTube video, which was posted on June 12:
At today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) questioned interim 23andMe CEO Joseph Selsavage.
Oy vey! Look at Selsavage equivocate and squirm! It’s a pathetic and reprehensible performance. And only Ceiling Cat knows what TTAM will do with our data. (Since I asked for mine to be deleted, Regeneron presumably doesn’t have it, but Selsavage isn’t at all clear about that.) Hawley is civil but also persistent, and manages to show up Selsavage as somewhat of a liar.
A reader sent me this 5½-minute video, and although I’d heard the song before (I once had a girlfriend, a classical soprano, who performed it with a colleague), I’m not sure I’ve featured it on this site. Here’s the YouTube caption:
During a tour in Asia in 1996, Régis Mengus and Hyacinthe de Moulins, members of the Little Singers of the Paris, performed the “Duetto buffo di due gatti”, accompanied on the piano by Rodolphe Pierrepont.
The “Duetto buffo di due gatti” (humorous duet for two cats) is a performance piece for two sopranos and piano. Often performed as a comical concert encore, it consists entirely of the repeated word miau (“meow”) sung by the singers. It is sometimes performed by a soprano and a tenor, or a soprano and a bass.
While the piece is typically attributed to Gioachino Rossini, it was not actually written by him, but is instead a compilation written in 1825 that draws principally on his 1816 opera Otello. Hubert Hunt claims that the compiler was Robert Lucas de Pearsall, who for this purpose adopted the pseudonym “G. Berthold”.[
Don’t miss the complex, fast-paced ending after the applause. Who wouldn’t like this song as part of a classical music concert? Play it for your cat, too!
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The BBC informs us in two article (click to read) that a famous cat named Hendrix has been memorialized, and explains why.
Some information (“Saltburn” is “Saltburn-by-the-Sea,” on the northeast coast of England:
A cat that became a “local celebrity” has had a statue unveiled in its honour.
More than £4,000 was raised to place a bronze statue on Saltburn’s pier in Redcar and Cleveland, where Hendrix was a familiar face – often letting himself into cafes and the local arcades.
Owner Nathan Bye thanked the people of Saltburn, Hendrix’s international social media fanbase and Redcar Council who had supported the campaign to memorialise him.
The article has a video about Hendrix, made by Adam Clarkson, which includes this frame of the statue’s unveiling. It’s worth the minute’s watching. People loved Hendrix, and raised £4000 to hve this statue made:
Another article from the Beeb tells us why Hendrix got so much love (click headline to read):
An excerpt from the 2024 piece:
“He always wanted to be outside,” Hannah Chiarella recalls, adding: “Sometimes he was outside for two or three weeks.”
But she did not need to worry too much when her cat Hendrix went on another adventure – his many fans would keep an eye out for him.
First on Tyneside, where he was often seen riding the Metro or hitching lifts on buses, and later on the beach at Saltburn in Redcar and Cleveland, he became something of a local legend.
So much so, people now want to put up a statue in Saltburn in memory of Hendrix, who died aged 12 in September.
“I thought it was quite a nice idea because he did used to bring a lot of joy to people at the beach,” Ms Chiarella says.
“I thought a nice memorial would continue bringing joy,” she adds.
. . .When the family moved closed to Whitley Bay Metro station and later to Saltburn, Hendrix, who was named after Jimi Hendrix, again went about winning over the locals and visitors.
People would send Ms Chiarella photos informing her of Hendrix’s whereabouts and she set up a Facebook page to keep everyone updated.
“We weren’t as worried about him because we knew that everyone was looking out for him,” she says.
Once in Saltburn, Hendrix made the beach his new hangout spot.
“He knew there were a lot of people there and he was going to get a lot of attention,” Ms Chiarella says
He used to go to Saltburn Pier Amusements every day and owner Chelsie Oughton says he used the place as a base, with people travelling just to see him.
“He was charming and just really funny,” Ms Oughton says, adding: “He was here every single day and people couldn’t help but notice him.
“He was a beautiful cat, like a little legend.”
But Hendrix was more than just a cute visitor – Ms Chiarella says he would also cheer people up.
“We used to get messages from people saying how they were sat at the beach, maybe feeling down, and Hendrix would just pop up,” she says.
“It would be a nice part of his life, he helped people as well,” she adds.
RIP, Hendrix. Here’s a short BBC video on Facebook. Click to watch it and be sure to put the sound on.
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Finally, we have a short article about carousel animals that were cats. The article below (click on either headline) gives the following information, along with a bunch of carousel-cat photos.
Golden Age carousel cats (of the domestic sort) came from mostly from The Dentzel Co. and Herschell-Spillman in the US. There were some very rare early PTC cats, but it’s hard to tell if they are domestic or more like Bobcats. Bayol carved a nice domestic carousel cat in France. The other european cats, like the early PTC, appear to be anything from Lynx or Bobcats to small Leopards or Puma. Often the domestic cats would be with their catch in mouth. Usually a fish or bird or occasional rodent, but not always. One Dentzel cat has a crustacean catch. There were quite a few cats carved, but not a lot by any one maker, so they remain among the more coveted carousel figures.
CAROUSEL CATS(ca. 1895-1928) – Historic carousel menagerie figures – Carousel Cats. Dentzel, Herschell-Spillman, Bayol and others carved carousel cats. Often the cats would be with their catch in mouth. Quite a few, but not a lot of cats were carved by any one maker, so they remain among the move coveted carousel figures.
I gather from this that old carousel animals are now collector’s items, which is no surprise.
Here’s a Saturday potpourri of photos and videos from several readers. Their comments are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.
A video from Jonathan Dore:
I took this video a couple of days ago when I noticed a solitary ant dragging the carcass of a dead wasp across our deck. By the time I got my phone out, it had gone over the edge and was carrying the wasp, while hanging upside down, along the bottom edge of the edging strip of the deck. After going a couple of feet it disappeared behind the edging strip, presumably the entrance point to its nest, or at least the next part of its route. At first I thought the ant was holding onto the wasp with a couple of legs while hanging on to the deck with the other four, but looking closer I believe it’s using all six legs to hang on and is carrying the wasp using only its jaws. Both aspects — the leg-hanging and the jaw clasping — see like a good illustration of the ant’s remarkable strength.
And a short video of the spider emerging from the lettuce with narration by Natalie:
An insect and some mammals from Christopher Moss. First, the insect:
The white-spotted spruce sawyer (Monochamus-scutellatus), likely a male from the length of the antennae:
From Christopher Moss, “the first muskrat [Ondatra zibethicus] photos of the year”. He adds:
I see he is eating a stand of reeds, and has nearly flattened all of it. Fortunately there are plenty more for him to move on to.
From Paul T.:
Urban wildlife or near my house. West side of Madison WI. Just taken with my phone. Sandhill cranes [Antigone canadensis] from last spring, and last month’s wild turkeys [Meleagris gallopavo], with four strutting their stuff, and one outside my window.
. . . And from Cate Plys, a squirrel that’s probably leucistic:
I found it near our place in Michigan where we are now! Sadly it scampered up a tree and I had to take these pics at extreme close up, so the quality could be a lot better.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, June 14, 2024, and National Cucumber Day, a vegetable best instantiated in the half-sour pickle. Here’s where you get the best one: The Pickle Guys in NYC (my fave used to be Gus’s Pickles, but that place has gone downhill). I like the garlic half-sours. This is one of several stop on Coyne’s Famous Lower East Side Tour, which also includes a visit to Yonah Schimmel’s for knishes and, of course, Katz’s Deli for pastrami. Oh, and Russ and Daughters for a bagel with lox and a schmear.
A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the federal government’s mobilization of the California National Guard to protect immigration agents from protesters in Los Angeles. He ruled that the Trump administration had illegally taken control of the state’s troops and ordered them to return to taking orders from Gov. Gavin Newsom.
In an extraordinary 36-page ruling, Judge Charles Breyer of the Federal District Court in San Francisco severed Mr. Trump’s control of up to 4,000 National Guard troops, hundreds of whom are already deployed in the streets of Los Angeles on his orders. The judge said the administration’s seizure of them violated required procedures in a federal statute.
President Trump’s “actions were illegal — both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” Judge Breyer wrote. “He must therefore return control of the California National Guard to the governor of the state of California forthwith.”
The directive would have taken effect at noon Pacific time on Friday. But the Trump administration immediately filed a notice that it was appealing Judge Breyer’s decision. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed to stay the ruling while it reviews the case, temporarily blocking it from taking effect.
The ruling, which accused Mr. Trump of setting a “dangerous precedent for future domestic military activity,” was the latest in a series of judicial rebukes to Mr. Trump’s expansive claims of wartime or emergency powers over matters ranging from deporting people without due process to unilaterally imposing widespread tariffs. Court rulings blocking his actions as likely illegal have enraged the White House.
Judge Breyer’s ruling on the National Guard went beyond what California had asked for. While the state’s lawsuit had contended that Mr. Trump’s mobilization of the National Guard was illegal, its specific motion was for a temporary restraining order limiting military forces under federal control to guarding federal buildings in the city and no other law enforcement tasks.
Judge Breyer blocked Mr. Trump from using California’s National Guard at all. But he also rejected a request by the state and Governor Newsom to restrain a separate group of active-duty Marines, which the administration has also mobilized to counter the protesters.
I guess this means that the National Guard will keep its presence in L.A. until a court lifts the stay. But the Marines aren’t banned, though they don’t seem to be doing anything:
Judge Breyer blocked Mr. Trump from using California’s National Guard at all. But he also rejected a request by the state and Governor Newsom to restrain a separate group of active-duty Marines, which the administration has also mobilized to counter the protesters.
*Over at the Liberal Patriot site, Ruy Teixiera argues, in a piece called “Riot On!: Democrats still don’t get it”, that the demonstrations and rioting in L.A. might have been designed to make the Democrats looks bad (h/t Enrico).
The chaos in Southern California could have been designed in a lab to exploit Democratic weak spots, combining the issues of illegal immigration, crime, and public disorder. Yet their most visible response to the anti-deportation riots in Los Angeles has been to denounce President Trump for sending National Guard troops to quell the riots. The situation, they insist, is under control—or at least it was, until Trump intervened.
This view is not shared by some in charge of actually doing the quelling. As Los Angeles police chief Jim McDonnell admitted at a Sunday evening press conference:
We are overwhelmed…Tonight, we had individuals out there shooting commercial-grade fireworks at our officers…that can kill you…They’ll take backpacks filled with cinder blocks and hammers, break the blocks, and pass the pieces around to throw at officers and cars, and even at other people.
Meanwhile, California governor Gavin Newsom waved the bloody shirt of January 6, arguing that that was when the National Guard was needed and that therefore Trump is a hypocrite to call them in now. The state is now suing to stop the deployment while Newsom exchanges insults with Trump and White House “border czar” Tom Homan.
. . .In lonely contrast to these voices, John Fetterman, the maverick Democrat Senator from Pennsylvania channeled the normie voter reaction to violent street demonstrations:
My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement…I unapologetically stand for free speech, peaceful demonstrations, and immigration—but this is not that…This is anarchy and true chaos.
The Democrats’ own goals on the L.A. disorder are the mirror image of the mistakes made by the president himself in recent months. Just as Trump has overread his electoral mandate—going further and faster than many of his voters wanted and pursuing many unpopular policies—now the Democrats have assumed they have an “anti-mandate” to oppose more or less everything the president does.
Democrats do not have to cheer on every ICE raid, but they have to be seen to prioritize law and order and not deny the reality on the ground of violent protests.
Missing from their calculus is how popular many of the president’s policies remain. And that’s especially true on the two issues in question on the streets of L.A.: law and order, and illegal immigration.
I have to admit that if the L.A. cops can’t stop demonstrators from burning cars, shooting dangerous fireworks at The Law, looting, and vandalizing, then some other solution needs to be found. The L.A. police chief himself admits they needed help, and I can’t find myself blaming the crowd’s violence on Trump. (Granted, most demonstrators in LA. and elsewhere seem to be peaceful.) But the National Guard isn’t trained to control demonstrating crowds, and neither are the Marines. I hope they are given some emergency crowd-control advice if they’re used again.
“My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement. … I unapologetically stand for free speech, peaceful demonstrations, and immigration — but this is not that. … This is anarchy and true chaos,”
Decades of Israeli warnings against Iran’s nuclear program and preparations for military action to thwart it culminated early Friday morning with the Jewish state launching a major offensive against the Islamic Republic, striking nuclear sites, military facilities, missile bases and senior leadership.
Jerusalem said it had engaged in a “precise, preemptive strike” against Iran, declaring an imminent threat from its nuclear program and announcing a domestic state of emergency as citizens braced for retaliation. Top officials warned of a potential prolonged conflict, noting that Tehran had the power to inflict significant pain upon Israel.
Multiple waves of Israeli strikes were reported throughout Iran for several hours, starting at around 3 a.m. and into the morning. Over 200 Israeli Air Force aircraft were involved in the opening strikes, and fighter jets dropped over 330 munitions on some 100 targets, the IDF said.
The operation, dubbed “Rising Lion,” was directed at Iran’s nuclear program — the military assessed Iran currently has enough enriched uranium to build 15 nuclear bombs — as well as its ballistic missile factories and its military capabilities, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the military said.
Israel said it had no choice but to attack Iran, adding that it had gathered intelligence that Tehran was approaching “the point of no return” in its pursuit of a nuclear weapon.
“The Iranian regime has been working for decades to obtain a nuclear weapon. The world has attempted every possible diplomatic path to stop it, but the regime has refused to stop,” the military said in a statement.
Confirmed killed in the strikes was Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Hossein Salami. Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported that the chief of Iran’s military, Mohammad Bagheri, was also dead. Jerusalem assessed that other top brass and senior nuclear scientists were killed as well.
Blasts were reported in Natanz, the site of a key nuclear facility, as well as in and around the capital Tehran.
All Israeli Air Force pilots and aircrews who participated in the strikes returned to their bases unharmed, the military said late on Friday morning.
The Israeli operation was expected to last days, according to military officials, who added that the IDF was preparing for heavy fire from Iran, but asserted that “at the end of the operation, there will be no nuclear threat” from the Islamic Republic.
. . . Netanyahu and Iranian state TV confirmed that one target of the strikes was the Natanz enrichment facility, one of two underground nuclear sites in the country, the other being at Fordo.
The “Natanz enrichment facility has been hit several times,” state TV reported Friday morning, showing footage of heavy smoke billowing from the site.
Two tweets:
Footage shared on social media shows the Israeli strikes on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility earlier today. pic.twitter.com/yBcUxs23As
— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) June 13, 2025
I’m stunned that Israel could build an entire secret drone base in Iran, 1000 km from Israel. They even moved vehicles to Iran, which means that there were a bunch of brave Mossad commandos, who would be instantly killed if they were caught.
The Mossad spy agency reveals footage showing its actions against Iranian air defenses and ballistic missile launchers in Iran this morning.
According to an Israeli official, the Mossad built a secret explosive drone base in Iran for this morning’s operation.
— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) June 13, 2025
I’m still amazed that the operation went off as well as it did, though I am unsure about whether Israel did take out Iran’s ability to make a deliverable nuclear warhead. And I think Iran realizes its impotence to damage Israel using the weapons it has now. This is going to go on for a long time, and Israel, if it’s to do serious damage, must somehow get bombs to the underground facility at Natanz.
*As always, I’ll steal a few items from the incomparable Nellie Bowles’s weekly news and snark column at the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: ICE raid on Aisle 4.” Sadly, because nobody can replace Nellie, this column (and next week’s) will be written by her vacation replacement, Will Rahn. Actually, his column isn’t bad, but I do want Nellie back ASAP.
→ Don’t go to Home Depot like that: At the heart of the protests is a genuinely nasty little change in deportation practices. The Trump admin is doing big, high-profile snatches of immigrants as they’re trying to get work. Here’s a great Wall Street Journal story on the new strategy designed by Trump adviser and Bond villain Stephen Miller: “Agents didn’t need to develop target lists of immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, a longstanding practice, Miller said. Instead, he directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away.” Super chill bet, Stephen. So ICE agents are going to Home Depots and just grabbing guys who are there trying to get some work that day, i.e., literally the most productive illegal immigrants you could find. It’s the shock and awe method. The panic is the point. The car burners are right on cue.
It’s important to note that a majority of Americans now disapprove of how Trump’s doing this. If the optics of burning cars and waving Mexican flags aren’t great, so too are the bad optics of masked, anonymous ICE guys tackling hardworking day laborers. They ought to do violence like how I do violence: quietly, at my computer, over Slack. With my eyes, when a driver rushes through a yellow light and I’m walking. With my grip on the stroller. Silent. But smoldering. Our current immigration policy feels wild, schizophrenic. On the one hand, we constantly read about illegal immigrants with long records of violent crime getting just one more chance in Berkeley (he killed the last wife, but let’s try one more before prison, okay? It takes two to do a murder), then you have Stephen Miller sending SEAL Team Six to grab a woman as she picks strawberries.
Even Trump is now saying that deportations have gotten out of control and his employees must be stopped.
→ David Hogg is out: It’s done. The Hoggster (Hoggmeister? Skinny-armed legend? Nevermind) is out as DNC vice chair, ousted because his election violated the gender-balance rules, and he pissed everyone off. He says he won’t run for it again. Well done, guys! And DNC chair Ken Martin has said privately that he doesn’t even want to keep doing his own job these days: “I’ll be very honest with you, for the first time in my 100 days on this job. . . the other night I said to myself for the first time, I don’t know if I wanna do this anymore.”
What’s shocking is that it took him 100 days. Can you imagine wanting the job of DNC chair? How psychotic you must be to desire that? That’s like wanting to be the beverage director on the Titanic. To be DNC chair, you need to be on so many psychiatric medications that your mind is like a placid, gentle lake. Your phone rings and it’s James Carville calling you a dumb loser trash traitor creek scum and you need to say, “Okay, James, my love to your wife.” Your assistant position can only, by DNC bylaw, be filled by a blind, autistic, nonbinary Guatemalan. Those are the rules and you ratified them. And what if you can’t find that person? Maybe they don’t exist. So you need to be able to blind a Guatemalan with your own hands, using only your thumbs, and then make them stay on as your assistant. And they’re bad at getting back on email, but how can you blame them since they’re blind? That would be ableist, and would get you fired. Unless?
Here’s a Nate Silver quote given by Andrew Sullivan in his latest column: “This is Olympic-level DNC’ing. You can’t DNC any harder than this,” – Nate Silver on the woke logic that ousted David Hogg.
→ A little dramatic, Christiane: British CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour recently relayed the fear she felt traveling to Massachusetts to deliver a speech:
When I went to Harvard to give this speech, and it was just a few days ago, last week, I must say I was afraid. I’m a foreigner. I don’t have a green card. I’m not an American citizen. I’m fairly prominent. And I literally prepared to go to America as if I was going to North Korea. I took a burner phone, imagine that. . . . and I had nothing on the burner phone except a few numbers. . . . I was really afraid.
It’s Massachusetts, not Mosul, Christiane! You’re traveling to Harvard and you’re not Jewish—you’ll be fine. What, are you going to run into a cappella kids who demand to see your Social Security card? I actually think what’s happening is that people are freaking themselves out on Bluesky. Just like how X/Twitter is convincing me that the entire world is full of guys who think Hitler is misunderstood, Bluesky is convincing Christiane Amanpour that she needs a burner phone to visit Harvard Yard.
→Elsewhere in Gaza: Four weeks ago, Imad al-Hout, the director of the European Gaza Hospital, told reporters at TheNew York Times that he believed there were no tunnels under his hospital. This past weekend, Israel announced it had recovered the body of Muhammad Sinwar, Hamas’s military chief, from a tunnel directly under the hospital. A Times article begrudgingly admitted that there does seem to be a Hamas tunnel under the hospital. It goes on to suggest that letting the Hamas chief die by possibly suffocating him in said tunnel might be a war crime, calling up a war crimes expert. But, you see, blowing up the whole tunnel would have blown up the hospital, which sits above it. It’s a catch-22, and the only answer is for Jews in the Middle East to let themselves be killed off (have they considered it, asks the NYT).
Some of the news media who reported the absence of tunnels have yet to correct themselves; they can’t bear to!
The Trump administration’s attack on scientific institutions has been characteristically audacious: Eliminating the U.S. Agency for International Development, which funded healthcare interventions and research worldwide. Removing all the members of the vaccine advisory panel of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cutting healthcare research funding by $1.8 billion and overall funding for the National Institutes of Health by $3 billion.
It has also homed in on what might seem like a small-bore opponent: the highly specialized world of science and medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association.
In April, the Justice Department sent letters to 15 of the country’s top science and medical journals inquiring about “fraud,” “political bias” and “censorship.” “It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” read a letter addressed to the journal published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The letters were signed by Ed Martin, then the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and now President Trump’s pardon attorney.
Neil McCabe, a spokesperson for Martin, said the list of journals came directly from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the letters were a response to legitimate public grievances. “You have a bunch of leftists who are sitting on big pots of money from pharma, and they all entertain each other and publish their friends,” McCabe said. “They were basically publishing lies.”
“I think it was an intimidation tactic,” said Eric Rubin, the editor of NEJM, which responded to the letter with a statement citing its “rigorous peer review” process, editorial independence and First Amendment rights. The Lancet, which did not receive a letter, posted an editorial denouncing the government’s letter as an “obvious ruse to strike fear into journals and impinge on their right to independent editorial oversight.”
Now I’m the first person to admit that quite a few scientific journals, including Nature, Science, and The Lancet, have become ideologically captured, pushing a “progressive” agenda in their op-eds and summary articles. Crikey, I’ve written about this quite a few times. But we cannot allow the government to impose restrictions on this stuff. For one thing, journals only hurt themselves when they hew to a political line (Nature lost credibility when it endorsed Biden), and, importantly, the meat of journals—the scientific research itself—seems by and large to remain politically neutral. It is scientists should police their journals, which is customary under academic freedom, but that freedom is violated when journals are bullied by the government to change their political leanings. Plus, of course, the journals are run as for-profit operations.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, a fog has settled on the land and Hili wants a change in the weather:
Not a tweet but a good video. Click below to hear a BBC tribute to Brian Wilson:
From Luana: Greta Thumberg has a sister who sings, and more or less how you’d expect Greta’s sister to sing:
Greta Thunberg’s sister goes viral for bizarre vocals while performing at an LGBTQI+ event.
Beata Thunberg, who goes by the name Beata Mona Lisa, posted a singing video showing off her bizarre voice on Instagram at the same time her sister, Greta, was being detained in Israel. pic.twitter.com/4taOuUWXgG
The photo likely depicts a family on Air India flight AI171, which crashed on June 12, 2025, in Ahmedabad, India, shortly after takeoff. Sources, including news reports, identify the family as Dr. Komi Vyas, Dr. Prateek Joshi, and their three children, relocating to London. The…
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. About this first one he asks, “How else can one interpret this statement?”:
Kristi Noem: "We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city."Sen. Alex Padilla is then forcibly removed!
You wanted zoomies? Well, you got ’em! Here’s the brood on June 11 doing a bit of postprandial zooming. It’s not absolutely predictable, though the probability of this behavior is highest after mealtime in the afternoon. It usually begins with one duck going underwater and swimming, and soon the rest follow, seeming to race each other across the pond. I keep my camera close by, ready to take video if I see imminent signs of the zoomies.
While this looks like “play”, it’s probably practice for flying and flapping their wings: eventually they’ll take off if they do this. As for whether the ducks are really having fun—getting pleasure out of this behavior, well—all I can respond is to utter the sentence that Jake tells Brett at the end of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”
The babies are nearly five weeks old in this video. It’s hard to imagine when they were helpless little fluffballs!
We’ll have a longer post with videos and duck pictures on Sunday.
Biology isn’t really like physics: we don’t have “laws” that are always obeyed, but instead have generalizations, some of which hold across nearly organisms (but even the “law” that organisms have DNA as their genetic material is flouted). The only “law” I can think of is really a syllogism that Darwin used to show natural selection: a). if there is genetic variation among individuals for a trait, and b). if carriers of some of the variants leaves more copies of their genes for the trait than carriers of other variants, then c). those genes will be overrepresented in future generations, and the trait will change according to the effects of the overrepresented genes.
But even that is not a “law” but a syllogism. After all, natural selection doesn’t have to work. There may be no genetic variation, as in organisms that are clonal, and different variants may not leave predictably different copies of themselves in future generations; such variants are called “neutral”. So there is no “law” that natural selection has to change organisms.
In this paper (click on screenshot below, or find the pdf here), evolutionary geneticist Michael Lynch from Arizona State University goes after two papers (cited at bottom of this post) that, he says, are not only failed attempts to concoct “laws” of evolution, but are flat wrong because their proponents don’t know squat about evolutionary biology. I’ll try to be very brief because the arguments are complex, and unless you know Lynch’s work on the neutral theory, much of the paper is a tough slog. What is fun about the paper, though is that Lynch doesn’t pull any punches, saying outright that the authors don’t know what they’re doing.
Here’s the abstract followed by an early part of the paper, just to show you what Lynch is doing. Bolding is mine:
Abstract: Recent papers by physicists, chemists, and geologists lay claim to the discovery of new principles of evolution that have somehow eluded over a century of work by evolutionary biologists, going so far as to elevate their ideas to the same stature as the fundamental laws of physics. These claims have been made in the apparent absence of any awareness of the theoretical framework of evolutionary biology that has existed for decades. The numerical indices being promoted suffer from numerous conceptual and quantitative problems, to the point of being devoid of meaning, with the authors even failing to recognize the distinction between mutation and selection. Moreover, the promulgators of these new laws base their arguments on the idea that natural selection is in relentless pursuit of increasing organismal complexity, despite the absence of any evidence in support of this and plenty pointing in the opposite direction. Evolutionary biology embraces interdisciplinary thinking, but there is no fundamental reason why the field of evolution should be subject to levels of unsubstantiated speculation that would be unacceptable in any other area of science.
. . . we are now living in a new kind of world. Successful politicians and flamboyant preachers routinely focus on the development of false narratives, also known as alternative facts, repeating them enough times to convince the naive that the new message is the absolute truth. This strategy is remarkably similar to earnest attempts by outsiders to redefine the field of evolutionary theory, typically proclaiming the latter to be in a state of woeful ignorance, while exhibiting little interest in learning what the field is actually about. Intelligent designers insist that molecular biology is too complex to have evolved by earthly evolutionary processes. A small but vocal group of proselytizers clamoring for an “extended evolutionary synthesis” continues to argue that a revolution will come once a critical mass of disciples is recruited (7–9), even though virtually every point identified as ignored has been thoroughly evaluated in prior research; see table 1.1 in ref. 6. More than one physicist has claimed that all of biology is simply physics. But 2023 marked a new level of advocacy by a small group of physicists, chemists, and geologists to rescue the field of evolutionary science from obfuscation, and to do so by introducing new theories and laws said to have grand unifying potential.
Note Lynch’s criticism of the “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis”, a program (and associated group of investigators) who claim revolutionary ways of looking at evolution, which, as Lynch notes, have already been discussed under conventional neo-Darwinian theory.
There are two theories Lynch criticizes in this paper
1.) Assembly theory. This is the complicated bit from the paper of Sharma et al. (see references below). It involves an equation that supposedly gives a threshold beyond which the assembly of components indicates life that evolved via natural selection (I won’t define the components, either, which aren’t important for the general reader’s purpose:
According to Walsh, this equation is totally bogus because it neglects all the forces that can impinge on gene forms during evolution. An excerpt:
However, this is not the biggest problem with assembly theory and its proposed utility in revealing the mechanistic origins of molecular mixtures. A second, more fundamental issue is that the authors repeatedly misuse the term selection, failing to realize that, even in its simplest form, evolution is a joint function of mutation bias, natural selection, and the power of random drift. There is a fundamental distinction between the mutational processes that give rise to an object and the ability of selection (natural or otherwise) to subsequently promote (or eradicate) it. In the field of evolution, drift refers to the collective influences of stochastic factors governed by universal factors such as finite population size, variation in family sizes, and background interference induced by the simultaneous presence of multiple mutations; via the generation of noise, the magnitude of drift modulates the efficiency of selection. For the past century, these processes have been the central components of evolutionary theory (reviewed in refs. 5 and 6).
Because this theory neglects forces like mutation and genetic drift that can change frequencies of gene forms beyond natural selection, Lynch deems it “a meaningless measure of the origins of complexity.”
2.)The notion that organismal complexity is an inevitable result of natural selection. This goes after the paper of Wong et al., and you should already know that this can’t be true: evolution is not, in any lineage, a march towards more and more complex species. The immediate refutation is the existence of parasites like fleas and tapeworms, which have lost many of their features to pursue a parasitic lifestyle. If you make your living by parasitizing other organisms, natural selection can actually favor the loss of complexity. Tapeworms, for example, have lost many of their sensory systems, their digestive system, and features of their reproductive system. By any measure of complexity, they are much simpler than their flatworm ancestors.
Lynch points this out, and adds that there are lineages of microbes (very simple one-celled organisms like bacteria) that have not become more complex over the billions of years they existed. There may have been a burst of complexity when the lineages arose, but clearly bacteria haven’t been on a one-way march to primates. They are doing a fine job as they are:
Despite their substantially more complex ribosomes and mechanisms for assembling them, eukaryotes do not have elevated rates or improved accuracies of translation, and if anything, catalytic rates and degrees of enzyme accuracy are reduced relative to those in prokaryotes (with simpler homomeric enzymes). Eukaryotes have diminished bioenergetic capacities (i.e., growth rates) relative to prokaryotes (21, 22), and this reduction is particularly pronounced in multicellular species (23). Finally, it is worth noting that numerous organisms (parasites in particular, which constitute a large fraction of organisms) typically evolve simplified genomes, and many biosynthetic pathways for amino acids and cofactors have been lost in the metazoan lineage.
Another bit of evidence against Wong et al. is that their adducing “subfunctionalization”, whereby genes duplicate and the duplicate copies assume new functions, shows some “law” of increasing complexity. (The divergence of hemoglobins occurred in this way.) But Lynch suggests that genes don’t duplicate to make an organism more complex, and, moreover, the differential functions of duplicate genes can arise from selection being relaxed:
Subfunctionalization does not arise because natural selection is striving for such an endpoint, which is an energetic and a mutational burden, but because of the relaxed efficiency of selection in lineages of organisms with reduced effective population sizes. How then does one relate gene number to functional information?
Lynch winds up excoriating these new “theories” again:
For authors confident enough to postulate a new law of evolution, surely some methodology and supportive data could have been provided. Science is littered with historical fads that became transiently fashionable, only to fade into the background, with a nugget of potential importance sometimes remaining (e.g., concepts derived from chaos theory, concerted evolution, evolvability, fractals, network science, and robustness). But usually when the latter happens, there is a clear starting point. This is not the case with the “law of increasing functional information,” which fails to even provide useful definitions of function and information.
. . . . To sum up, all evidence suggests that expansions in genomic and molecular complexity, largely restricted to just a small number of lineages (one including us humans), are not responses to adaptive processes. Instead, the embellishments of cellular complexity that arise in certain lineages are unavoidable consequences of a reduction in the efficiency of selection in organisms experiencing high levels of random genetic drift.
I would take issue only with Lynch’s claim that only a “small number of lineages” have become more complex than their ancestors. Most multicellular organisms are this way. In the end, though, Lynch’s lesson is that people should learn more about evolutionary theory, which has grown quite complex, before they start proposing “revolutionary laws of evolution.”
